New ways to pay for research could boost scientific progress

How might science be done on an alien planet? Since the laws of nature are the same everywhere, the aliens would make the same discoveries as humans have—that matter is made of atoms, say, or that life develops via evolution. But while the results might be the same, aliens would be unlikely to have come up with the same methods for arriving at them. It would be remarkable if the little green men had invented universities, funding committees, a tenure system and all the other accoutrements of modern academic life.

This thought experiment, dreamed up by Michael Nielsen, a physicist, and Kanjun Qiu, an entrepreneur, was not merely a flight of fancy. It was part of an essay published last year pointing out that the way modern science is organised is not the only way it could be done, and perhaps not even the best way. Experimenting with different sorts of institutions, or novel ways to hand out research money, might help fix what the authors say is a “discovery ecosystem in a state of near stasis”.